In industrial automation facilities, optimal operation of the facility can partially depend on the equipment monitoring system employed therein. Equipment monitoring systems can collect data from, for example, computational devices (programmable logic controllers, programmable automation controller, etc.) in equipment located throughout the facility. The collected data can assist in, for example, monitoring equipment health, predicting when equipment failure will occur and/or informing operators when equipment failure has occurred. A computer interface, such as a human-machine interface (HMI), may be interconnected with the computational devices to facilitate programming or control thereof, to monitor the computational device, or to provide other such functionality.
Current approaches of data collection include, for example, utilizing an interface (e.g. Object Linking and Embedding for Process Control (OPC) server, open connectivity server) with the HMI or other computer to poll data from the computational devices according to a preset time interval. Such an approach may be less than optimal since a large amount of data is collected and stored even when there may be no activity or change in information. Further, since many times the OPC server is configured based on the configuration of the computational device, modifications to the software present on the computational device can prevent accurate data collection.
Other current approaches of data collection include, for example, programming the computational device to transmit data upon detection of a problem using the common industrial protocol (CIP). Although less data will typically be collected and stored using this approach as compared to the above-described polling approach, this is largely a reactive system. Accordingly, for example, data is captured only if the computational device detects an error. Further, simply collecting this error data may not permit an operator to engage in playback (i.e. replicate equipment performance) because complete performance data may not be have been transmitted by the computational device.